So Pretty, Yet So Stupid

Since it has become clear that the only thing I’m good for lately is movies and television, I thought it’d be appropriate for me to do movie reviews on here. To that end –

Ultraviolet

You’ve seen this girl before. You think to yourself “Wow – you look absolutely gorgeous. I should take some time and get to know you.” Then you spend time with her, and you’re left with “Wow – you look absolutely gorgeous. Too bad you’re such a terrible, terrible person.” This is Ultraviolet. It’s set in the future, where all of the architecture is done with exotic colors. So the setting is really cool, compared to most futuristic movies where everything is dark and dreary. It starts out with narration of how we got there, then throws us into the action. Let me tell you, the action looks spectacular. Violet kills about twenty guys, gets what she came for, then runs for her life. Then she meets more people, then runs for her life. This, unfortunately, is the crux of the story.

I’m going to break this down in simplistic terms, since there is absolutely no depth to it whatsoever. Violet meets another room of twenty guys. These guys are Asian. They speak a language I don’t understand, and Violet talks with them for a bit. There are no subtitles, so I have no idea what’s going on, except that they don’t like each other. The guys pull out guns and start shooting. Violet is unarmed, but since these guys are arranged in a circle around her, she just ducks and dodges as the bullets sail by, and the Asian guys kill each other. So what’s wrong with this scene? For starters, I thought Asians were smarter than that. No, wait, the bigger problem? I thought movie writers were smarter than that. This scene is so brazenly stupid it just blows my mind. Would these guys really just start firing away when their comrades are right on the other side? Is standing in a circle and firing off bullets at a target in the center the best way to solve this problem?

Well, now she’s on the run again. No time for character development. No time for any semblance of story. Oh, there’s a plot, don’t get me wrong. Unfortunately, it’s incomprehensible, and only comes in to during the sparing moments necessary to set up the next action sequence.

Still, I haven’t lost hope quite yet. Moving on, Violet has to find out some secrets and protect this young boy who is dying. To do so, she has to take on this guy and his corporation. And his 45 billion soldiers, all dressed in black. In fact, he warns her against this by saying “I have 7,000 soldiers. What can you possibly do?” In what is perhaps the greatest moment of cinematic foreshadowing I have ever seen, she replies, “I can kill them.” So what does she do? She walks into the building and starts killing them, I swear to God.

So we get some mega-action sequences. Once again, the stunning visual beauty of the sequences is surpassed only by their staggering stupidity. The plot holes are so numerous I can’t even begin to describe them all, except to say they come together to form a monstrous plot black hole, causing the entire move to collapse unto itself in an incredible display of filmmaking ineptitude.

Synopsis - Violet pulls out some machine guns and starts shooting people. Once everyone in the room is dead, more soldiers rush in, machine guns in hand. Violet shoots them all. The only thing that could make this any better? If more soldiers rush in, and Violet shoots them. And do they ever. But after awhile, you start to wonder – are their machine guns just props? Never once do these soldiers use their machine guns to, oh, let’s say, SHOOT AT THE BITCH. They charge in, guns in hand, and….run at her. Apparently the thinking behind this is, if they stack up enough dead bodies in the room, there will be an impenetrable wall of dead bodies, and she’ll just have to turn around and call it a day. Somehow, this plan fails, and Violet continues on her way through the building. I guess the point of this is to show you that Violet can kill billions and billions of people, all without getting a scratch on her. Sometimes she even uses a sword.

Now, again, don’t get me wrong – I like seeing when one character takes one scores of bad guys. The Matrix Reloaded is probably my favorite movie, and Neo takes on everyone and their momma. But somehow it seemed infinitely more plausible than Violet doing it in this movie. For one thing, Neo occasionally took a hit. He’d get knocked down, then get up and keep fighting. This is what gave the scenes some drama – not only were the fights breathtaking, they were also dramatic in the sense that, while we know he’ll win in the end, it’s clearly going to be a struggle to get there. Violet may as well have been taking on cardboard cutouts for all the damage they were capable of.

But wait, doesn’t that just make her more bad-ass? Maybe I’m just a sexist. Clearly I am, and the reason I don’t like this movie is that there’s a woman in it, and that never once did she make me some pie. But that wasn’t it. In fact, I had a bag of Twizzlers with me, and that’s the only thing that kept me from walking out of the movie halfway through, and I never do that. Not even during Freddie Got Fingered, which attempted to destroy everything that was right and good with the world, and offended me as a human being.

No, this movie was just wrong. Why did the bad guys not shoot at her? Perhaps they saw what happened with the Asian guys. Even still, they weren’t in a circle, so that wouldn’t have been an issue. So why didn’t they shoot at her? Why didn’t they use grenades, or unleash a toxic gas? The bad guys couldn’t do this to Neo because he could stop bullets with his mind. (Or, on occasion, turn them into doves.) Implausible? Sure. But the movie’s premise was that he was in a computer-simulated world, and by understanding that the world wasn’t real, he could bend the rules of the world with his mind. So shooting at him wouldn’t do any good. There was no such problem with Violet, yet the bad guys respectfully declined. And quickly I tire of jumping over these plot holes.

Then she fights the main bad guy (or, the Boss Dog, in the world of Zachar). They fight with swords, not guns. Good, I think. Of course, this guy doesn’t have any real powers I’m aware of, besides being extremely rich. So why in the hell he thinks he can defeat her after his 45 billion mentally deficient soldiers couldn’t is beyond me, but I’m so tired of thinking at this point, let’s just watch a sword fight. It seemed cool, then the lights went out, and they fought with flaming swords. Again, it looked cool, then she killed him. Then she was reunited with the boy, who had already died. And oh yeah, she died once in the movie too. The bad guys surrounded her and the boy. The boy died of his disease, and she was so sad she didn’t fight back when they stabbed her. Then suddenly she was back with this one good guy, a scientist, who somehow brought her back from the dead. Of course, I’d like to ask why the bad guys so graciously delivered the body of their mortal enemy to this good guy. But then, they’ve proven themselves exceedingly stupid and self-destructive in all previous instances, so why not.

The boss dog falls over, and Violet reunites with the boy. But before their emotional reunion could commence, I grabbed my jacket and walked out of the theater. No need to spoil this with any moments of actual character development. The brilliant phrase “You’re not getting attached or anything, are you?” comes to mind here. I had spent 90 visually spectacular yet intellectually crippling minutes with her, and I didn’t feel like cuddling.

My score: D
Recommendation: Not unless you’re desperate